DAharon - Slashdot User

First MySQL 5.5 Beta Released 95

Posted by kdawson on Friday December 18, 2009 @01:29PM from the taking-care-of-business dept.

joabj writes "While MySQL is the subject of much high-profile wrangling between the EU and Oracle (and the MySQL creator himself), the MySQL developers have been quietly moving the widely-used database software forward. The new beta version of MySQL, the first publicly available, features such improvements as near-asynchronous replication and more options for partitioning. A new release model has been enacted as well, bequeathing this version the title of 'MySQL Server 5.5.0-m2.' Downloads here."

South Africa Rolls Out Biometric Passports 60

Posted by timothy on Sunday April 19, 2009 @02:40AM from the rfids-please dept.

volume4 writes "The South African Department of Home Affairs has begun rolling out security enhanced passports to new applicants from this week. A facility in Pretoria which prints the new passports was officially opened last week by the minister of home affairs, Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula. The new passports have an embedded RFID chip which stores the owner's biometric information, including personal details, a high-resolution colour photograph and fingerprint information."

Comment Windows still important (Score 5, Interesting) 214

by DAharon on Saturday June 14, 2008 @11:03AM (#23787353) Attached to: Wall Street Becoming a Linux Stronghold

While I don't doubt that moving some of their infrastructure to a Linux environment would yield nothing but gains for them, the fact remains that a ton of those guys are wedded to Excel. Many have spent years fine tuning massive VB macros.

I have the same problem at my work. I want to automate and speed up a lot of the reporting my coworkers do by moving the processing over to one of our Linux servers, but Excel is always a problem. Some of our people actually see Excel as a platform in itself. It's become kind of a joke among some of us there. "Excel would make a great Operating System if only it had a decent spreadsheet."
Some of our macros can take upwards of twenty minutes to run.

I suppose they could use OpenOffice-server, and I've considered playing around with it, but it seems like too much unnecessary overhead. Right now I think I'm gonna give JExcelAPI a whirl as soon as I get a break in between projects.

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